Life
keeps
coming at me. It
keeps
making endless demands of me. "Here I am!" it unwaveringly shouts,
always
standingface to face,
nose to nose directly in front of me. "Engage with me!" it
urgently insists. And for worse or for better for as long as this
lasts, I have
choice in the matter
of how I'm going to respond. I can also
choose
to not respond. But the latter never does me any good. It
doesn't make life's demands go away - in fact it ensures they'll
increase. Even closing my
eyes
at night into
sleep
/ unconsciousness, only provides a temporary
illusion
that they're
gone:
when I
wake
in the morning, they're still here (they never go away). And in the
new
day, whether I respond to it or not, life still
keeps
coming at me, charging forward directly at me. It's
relentless.
That's life - as I'm distinguishing it.

One of
the ways
life
keeps
coming at me (ie one of the
relentlessways
life
keeps
coming at me) is through people. As a principle, I say I'm
open
to everyone. As a practical matter (ie
speakingauthentically),
the truth
is I have preferences: I enjoy some people more than others. That's not
always a conscious differentiation. Some people
simply
occur for me as "Uh oh ... here comes
trouble.".
Others
show up
as
"Lovely
to see you again
my Friend!"
(as the Moody Blues may have said). And then there are others who, when
they
show up,
put me in a space of
ecstasy,
a space in which
my heart
sings and pounds uncontrollably like a
star-struck
schoolboy. Around such people I would give it all to spend the rest of
my life.
It's what I yearn to do. And I'm not even
speaking
to the practical matter of whether or not an ongoing
relationship
with me would or could ever actually
work
for them. Rather I'm
speaking
to what Emily Dickinson distinguishes when she says
"The heart
wants what it wants.". And when
the heart
doesn't
get
what it wants? Well ... we've all been there, yes? That's
love
- as I'm distinguishing it.

So there's life and the demands it makes on me ongoingly, and there's
my responses to the demands it makes on me ongoingly (some of which
fail, and some of which succeed) for as long as this lasts. And there's
love,
which includes
"I love you"
as a
speech act
(that's tantamount to saying
"Loveis
'I love you')
that
stands
on the
platform
of unconditionally accepting another
the way
they are (and
the way
they aren't). But it also includes
love
like a
star-struck
schoolboy, that deliciously edgy
being-in-the-presence-of-another
which, without explanation or warning, suddenly triggers all those
dizzying responses in me we call (perhaps inaccurately if not
poetically)
"falling in love".
In whatever space I have for life to
show upthe way
it
shows up,
loveshows upthe way
it
shows up,
along with everything else I'm given to deal with. That's life,
love,
and the
whole
damn thing - as I'm distinguishing them.

So what I've started
looking
at in depth ie what I've
begun
taking seriously (which
means
I've started dealing with life,
love,
and the
whole
damn thing as if
my life
depends on it) are the
choices
available to me which allow life,
love,
and the
whole
damn thing to
work
better,
choices
which result in me not
getting
in their
way,
which in turn allows me to
perform
in
ways
which maximize my responses to them. I can either leave dealing with
life,
love,
and the
whole
damn thing to
happenstance
(ie to chance), or I can live
my life
in
a way
that forwards the likelihood of it
working,
allowing me to
perform
more effectively. And
watch:
either
way,
life will still
keep
coming at me, always making demands of me,
relentlessly
- just as it will
keep
coming at you too, always making demands of you too,
relentlessly
(I'm sorry, but for us there's just no escape from that one).

Don't count on finding an
easyway
out of this. Life will go on making endless demands of us for as long
as it goes on. That may be forever. And then maybe it'll
stop
- may-be. But until then, life,
love,
and the
whole
damn thing is what we
got
(no, it's all we
got)
without respite. It's
the game
that was going on before you and I
got
here. And it'll go on long after we've
gone.
It
plays
by its own rules. It's
relentless,
inexorable,
ruthless. It doesn't care about what you want or about what you don't
want. And arguably the only
choice
we can make that has any impact on how we fare in
the game,
is whether we
play
in
integrity,
or not. Any other
choices
we could ever make (or speculate we could make) are so far down the
list of what
really
impacts
performance
(aka living well) as to be almost totally irrelevant.